She was sitting on the toilet, naked, smoking. A half dozen butts littered the floor; the bathroom was a tobacco cloud. She looked like the woman from Mars: tears had melted her makeup and her lipstick was still smudged from their lovemaking.
Buzz knelt in front of her. “Honey, I’ll take care of it. This was for Mickey, so I think we’re okay. But I should stay away from you for a while, just in case this guy had partners–we don’t want them figurin’ out it was you and me instead of you and Mickey.”
Audrey dropped her cigarette on the floor and snuffed it with her bare feet, no pain registering. She said, “All right,” a hoarse smoker’s croak.
Buzz said, “You strip the bed and burn it in the incinerator. There’s bullets in the mattress and the wall, you dig ’em out and toss ’em. And you don’t tell _nobody_.”
Audrey said, “Tell me it’ll be all right.” Buzz kissed the part in her Side 136
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The hair, seeing the two of them strapped down in the gas chamber. “Honey, this will surely be all right.”
o
o
o
Buzz drove Niles’ car to the Hollywood Hills. He found gardening tools in the back seat, a level patch of hardscrabble off the access road to the Hollywood Sign and buried Mickey Cohen’s would-be assassin in a plot about 4 by 4 by 4, working with an earth spade and grub hoe. He packed the dirt hard and tight so coyotes wouldn’t smell flesh rot and get hungry; he put branches atop the spot and pissed on it: an epitaph for a fellow bad cop who’d put him in the biggest trouble of his trouble-prone life. He buried Niles’ gun under a thornbush, drove the car out to the Valley, wiped it down, yanked the distributor and left it in an abandoned garage atop Suicide Hill–a youth gang fuck turf near the Sepulveda VA Hospital. Undrivable, the Vicky would be spare parts inside twenty-four hours.
It was 4:30 A.M.
Buzz walked down to Victory Boulevard, caught a cab to Hollywood and Vermont, walked the remaining half mile to Melbourne Avenue. He found a pay phone, glommed “Eugene Niles” from the White Pages, dialed the number and let it ring twenty times–no answer. He located 3987–the bottom left apartment of a pink stucco four-flat–and let himeif in with Niles’ keys, set to prowl for one thing: evidence that other men were in on the Mickey hit.
It was a typical bachelor flop: sitting/sleeping room with Murphy bed, bathroom, kitchenette. There was a desk facing a boarded-up window; Buzz went straight for it, handling everything he touched with his shirttails. Ten minutes in, he had solid circumstantial evidence:
A certificate from the U.S. Army Demolition School, Camp Polk, Louisiana, stating that Corporal Eugene Niles successfully completed explosives training in December 1931–make the fucker for the bomb under Mickey’s house.
Letters from Niles’ ex-wife, condemning him for trucking with Brenda Allen’s hookers. She’d read the grand jury transcript and knew her husband did his share of porking in the Hollywood Station felony tank–Niles’ motive to want Mickey dead.
An address book that included the names and phone numbers of four ranking Jack Dragna strongarms, listings for three other Dragna bagmen–cops he knew when he was LAPD–and a weird listing: “Karen Hiltscher, W. Hollywood Sheriff’s,” with “!!!!” in bright red doodles. That aside, more verification of Niles hating Mickey before the truce with Jack D. All told, it looked like a poorly planned single-o play, Niles desperate when his bomb didn’t blow the Mick to shit.
Buzz killed the lights and wiped both sides of the doorknob on his way out. He walked to Sunset and Vermont, dropped Niles’ house and car keys down a sewer grate and started laughing, wildly, stitches in his side. He’d just saved the life of the most dangerous, most generous man he’d ever met, and there was no way in the world he could tell him. The laughter got worse, until he doubled over and had to sit down on a bus bench. He laughed until the punch line sucker-punched him–then he froze.